Big data privacy challenge requires due process response, says paper

Big data doesn’t just utilize data: It creates data often of a highly personal nature, and that’s a challenge to today’s set of privacy protections, argues a paper by a Microsoft researcher and a law academic.

Analytics of large data sets composed of many individually meaningless bits that aren’t themselves personally identifiable information can manufacture highly revealing information, note paper authors Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz, of Microsoft Research and the New York University School of Law, respectively.